Imagine buying a new car and not being able to decipher the owner's manual because it's in a language you don't read. Or remember the frustration of trying to register at a website form that doesn't recognize your country's postal code format. Think about the impact of making important healthcare decisions if you don't understand what the doctor says. It's only when translation, localization, or interpreting aren't there that consumers recognize their true value. But for businesses, governmental bodies, or non-profits, adapting their products and services for their domestic and international customers is essential to their success.

This report describes the industry that provides the language-related services and technology that support these adaptations. For the 11th consecutive year, CSA Research conducted its annual study of the market for outsourced language services and technology. For this year's report, we surveyed 860 providers from our global database of 18,097 firms. It includes the following sections:

Market - an overview of the size of the language services and technology market, distribution of services, and forecasts

Demand and Supply - a description of language as an outsourced service, market participants, and the opportunities and challenges they face

Rankings - a discussion and listing of the leading suppliers in the global and regional markets for language services and technology, including commercially focused and government-centric firms

Services and Technology - an overview of the services and technologies in this sector, and revenue distribution for each category

Methodology - a description of the process that CSA Research follows in producing this report.

Appendix - tables showing revenue in local currency for companies that appeared in our 2014 and 2015 reports.

The report contains 42 tables and 12 charts, including:

Who's who in the language service and technology sectors, globally and by region — Asia, Africa, Europe (with separate listings for Eastern, Northern, Southern, and Western), Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, and Oceania

Market size estimates for the language services industry for 2015 through 2019, including region-specific breakdowns

Critical benchmarks for LSP financial performance, with average revenue per employee and per salesperson, including differences by company size and region

Overview of the services that have grown the most, such as translation, software localization, and on-site interpreting

Breakdown of the market with estimates by service for transcreation, translation technology, machine translation post-editing, video interpreting, mobile and game localization, and other services

Breakdown of the market for technology sold by LSPs and technology providers with estimates for translation management, translation memory, terminology, machine translation, interpreting management, and other software